Apparently due to paucity of funds, the Federal Government has adopted an alternative source of funding of road projects for the nation. Government has decided to opt for bond financing to be able to implement action on ongoing road projects in the country.

The Transportation Minister, Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke, told State House correspondents yesterday that Trunk A roads in the country had been listed as priority projects in the coming year.

Alison-Madueke also noted that the government would be seeking alternative funding through bonds to execute most of the listed road projects.

The minister also hinted that the much-talked-about re-introduction of tolls would not come until the country's roads have been improved upon.

She however warned that the current global economic crisis might hamper some of the proposed works.

Alison-Madueke, who was at the Presidential Villa, said the government was trying to fix most of the deplorable roads in the country within the budgetary allocations, which, she said, were not enough to fix all the roads calling for attention.

Said she: "With 34,000- plus kilometres of roads in the federal system you will agree and understand that a lot of roads are still in deplorable conditions and it is the situation which, taking cognizance of the depleting budgetary allocations, will take us a certain amount of time, even at the best of times to search right.

"Now we are trying to focus on a number of areas to try and fix the situation we have found ourselves. The current global meltdown will probably not assist in this particular instance because I will imagine that funds even further depleted in terms of budgetary allocations, so we are also looking at bond financing; we have set aside a number of those as well in each geopolitical zone and we are applying for bond financing through the Debt Management Office if that comes on stream because that is one of the areas we are really focusing on to assist us in getting additional funds for our roads."

Speaking on the re-introduction of tolls, Alison-Madueke said, "Like I have said severally, the re-introduction of toll gate will not be an issue until we actually have roads, dual express roads of international quality and calibre that will actually necessitate or sustain tolling."

"They should be of a quality that actually makes the Nigerian road users happy to pay certain amount of tolls to use those roads and that is not the situation right now."

On when the country will have befitting roads, she said, "Well we are very hopeful that our build and operate pilot scheme, some of which we advertised on the 26th of September... we advertised the Lagos -Badagry-Seme expressway, we advertised the Abuja-Kaduna-Kano and Benin-Ore-Shagamu expressways. We are already getting a lot of letters of expression and again we are hoping that these pilot schemes with investors will kick off early next year, as soon as processes and procedures are underway. "While in the interim we still try to find the funds to actually rehabilitate those roads and keep them passable. "Now that is actually the struggle, but we will try to do that as aggressively as possible and expect that those roads will then transmit into the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) and then operate-and-transfer business model sometime in the new year. "We are also listing about 22 roads and bridges as well for this build, operate and transfer; those will come on stream again and will be advertised early in the new year, after the preliminary design studies have been done.